International Commodity Prices and Civil War Outbreak: New Evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa and Beyond

No 6866, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: A new dataset by Bazzi and Blattman (2014) allows examining the effects of international commodity prices on the risk of civil war outbreak with more comprehensive data. I find that international commodity price downturns sparked civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa. Another finding with the new dataset is that commodity price downturns also sparked civil wars beyond Sub-Saharan Africa since 1980. Effects are sizable relative to the baseline risk of civil war outbreak. My conclusions contrast with those of Bazzi and Blattman, who argue that the new dataset rejects that commodity price downturns cause civil wars. The reason is that I calculate commodity price shocks using time-invariant (fixed) export shares as commodity weights. Bazzi and Blattman also calculate commodity price shocks using export shares as commodity weights but the exports shares they use are time-varying. Using time-invariant export shares as commodity weights ensures that time variation in price shocks solely reflects changes in international commodity prices. Price shocks based on time-varying export shares partly reflect (possibly endogenous) changes in the quantity and variety of countries’ exports, which jeopardizes causal estimation. I also show that setting time-invariant export shares equal to average export shares over the sample period, can be a way of dealing with attenuation bias due to mismeasured export shares. When I differentiate between agricultural commodities on the one hand and minerals, oil, and gas on the other, I find stronger increases in the risk of civil war outbreak following downturns in agricultural commodity prices.

Keywords: civil wars; commodity price downturn (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-his and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6866.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: International Commodity Prices and Civil War Outbreak: New Evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa and Beyond (2018)
Working Paper: International Commodity Prices and Civil War Outbreak: New Evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa and Beyond (2018)
Working Paper: International commodity prices and civil war outbreak: new evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6866

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().